Sonic has always been a series focused on going fast, so it’s also been a long-time favorite of the speedrunning community. You’ll have enough of a challenge just focusing on gaining speed as you circle the track in pursuit of the Emerald. The developers also made a smart choice by not requiring the player to do anything special when they catch up to the UFO (you don’t need to attack it or anything), because it’s very easy to imagine the frustration of jumping and missing your target due to the stage’s unusual 3D perspective. ![]() The faux 3D effects on display in these stages are charming while still being much easier to make sense of visually than the Sonic CD stages which inspired them, and which look pretty bad in retrospect. Go fast enough for long enough and you’ll reach the UFO and collect the emerald, but you’ll need to avoid running off the track or hitting obstacles in order to reach the necessary top speed. Collecting blue spheres on the ground will increase your speed, while collecting rings will add valuable seconds to your clock. ![]() These stages have Sonic (or whichever character you are playing as) chasing after a UFO which holds one of the Chaos Emeralds. Sonic Mania is no different, and when players find and enter giant rotating rings hidden throughout the game’s levels they’ll reach a simulated 3D racetrack mode inspired by special stages in Sonic CD. Properly beating a Sonic game has always involved collecting all the Chaos Emeralds, bonus items which have been unlocked through a variety of different special stages over the years. It’s not currently clear whether those Medallions are worth anything other than bragging rights, but they’re likely to have Sonic completionists drooling regardless. ![]() Some of the maps are totally new for Mania, while others are adaptations of those from Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles.Ĭompleting a bonus stage with all spheres collected awards players a Silver Medallion, while collecting all spheres and all rings gives a perfect score and a Gold Medallion. This transports the player into a random bonus stage map that they haven’t yet completed. Sonic Mania’s bonus stages are accessed by collecting 25 rings, reaching one of a level’s checkpoints, then jumping into the swirling stars which appear over the checkpoint. The D-Pad just didn’t feel quite right for the experience, and I’ll be looking at picking up a USB Genesis controller post-launch, to play the game as the Sonic Gods intended. I wasn’t able to successfully complete any of the stages in my short demo, but I’ll go ahead and blame that (at least in part) on the Xbox controller I was using. These stages are all about timing and properly judging when you need to turn or jump, which is a challenge given both the strange visual perspective of the stages and your gradually increasing speed (spend a lot of time picking up rings instead of spheres, and you’ll make the stage much harder on yourself). Playing these bonus stages immediately brought me back to my days playing Sonic 3, and muscle memory immediately kicked in. Touching a red sphere ends your run, yellow spheres launch you, and white spheres bounce you backwards. In an early version of the behind-the-back 3D running that would come to define later Sonic games, the camera watches over the shoulder of Sonic (or Tails, or Knuckles) as the player guides the character through collecting all the level’s blue spheres. Bonus stagesīonus stages in Sonic Mania take the form of the “Blue Sphere” gameplay mode fans will remember from Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. I had a chance to go hands-on with all the newly revealed content, and can confirm it’s exactly the sort of authentic retro gameplay fans want, with just the right amount of modern polish. This morning Sega revealed some additional details about the upcoming title, including information about the game’s special and bonus stages, as well as the nature of the new speedrunner-friendly Time Attack mode. But it’s too late to stop it now, and all signs point to Sonic Mania being everything fans of classic Sonic have been hoping for since Sonic & Knuckles. It’s the sort of game many Sonic fans had assumed we would never see again and, as we found in our interview with two of the heads of Sonic Team, it was a project that faced internal skepticism from the very beginning. ![]() The retro, 2D Sonic the Hedgehog title, constructed by fan developers and looking like some lost game from the mid-90s, will be out in just a few short weeks.
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